Sacredness of sexuality key in building a sober community

In today’s Kenya, when someone tells you “I love you to death” do not blush - rush out! “I love you to death” has ceased being a romantic statement. It is now a security statement. The age of gold diggers has evolved to the world of dagger wielders. 

For the longest time parents would be happy to welcome their child’s suitor to their home. But the welcome is no longer as natural. The questions a suitor is asked have since increased. A key question is “Where did you meet?” This question is asked in the hope that the meeting was not in the internet. But more and more the answer is not favouring the parents’ hope.

The internet is not yet received as a valid meeting point. Worse still, love is the news as the new e-hunting zone for impostors. In the steamy interactions, lust-driven discernment has the “true north” sensually generated.

A lustful world has dangerously blurred boundaries. Marriage hardly gets sacred respect. The fence in the form of a ring on the finger is easily overrun. Faithfulness has been relegated to the place of a personal pet-value with a waning social recognition. The new world has no walls. The blessing of the ties that bind is in their looseness.

Many get married not with till-death in mind but with divorce in mind. By this thinking, when one partner looks as if they are investing too much the other works hard to divest – staying long was never the plan! Once upon a time it was the holy matrimony until the serpent arrived and asked the killer question “Did He really say?” With doubt came death.

People have gone beyond just breaking the Ten Commandments to mastering the breaking. With this, the sacredness of sexuality has been hacked. Today’s best seller is “70 ways to break the 7th commandment.” Commandment breaking is a profession and many make a lot of money breaking them.  What would you call such money? Broken money.

Adults keep pushing the sexuality topic to teenagers as if they have no need for the lesson. What is unclear is when they matured and graduated from needing the lesson! From observation, it can be argued that parents need sexuality lessons as much as the teenagers - similar classes, just different modules. Sexuality is a life-long lesson. To pretend that you are past it is a fallacy.

As long as sanity in love relationships remains a goal, learning is inevitable. Gaps in knowledge lead to gaps in marriage. Priests have had too many stories of marriages that collapse on the stairs of the church as the couple are on their way out. 

How does love turn to hate? What changes a bouquet into a bullet? When does a kiss turn into a knife? How does a date diarized for pleasure turn into death? These are the questions of our lives. Love chambers are turned into death chambers. The announcement “I’m in a relationships” is no longer greeted with celebration until the misfortune test turns negative.  

The dark side of technology is marked by graves of real people – young people especially. Ironically, the end of the young lives began when they found love over the internet. They e-dating led to their erasing.  As we hail technology, it hauls stones at us in some quarters. While the ones who make the news are the ones who actually died, many more are dead-men-walking, casualties of internet romance.

The e-romance streets have no controller. It is the fingers doing the talking by liking, posting and then planning a date with an entity you hope is true. Tragically, criminals in the name of love have arrived in the e-love streets. They are doing the devils work, including killing young people dead. Pastors surface on the dead end, literally, to bury the e-victims. It is time pastors effected backward integration where instead of just burying the e-victims they intentionally entered the e-streets creating e-spaces with comprehensive e-solutions to love questions by the e-citizens.

The time of pastors bashing the internet is long gone. It is now time for agents of God and good to invade the internet. It time for e-missions focusing on e-sins to get people out of e-pits and point them to the e-church.

God did not say “Do not commit adultery” with the intent of denying humans this romantic pleasure. The commandment is not about stopping its enjoyment but setting up order to support it. Human beings have rejected this order in the name of sexual liberation. The consequence is not Good News. The “free love” has turned very expensive. In hindsight, however reluctant our admission, the commandments against adultery and fornication made sense.

The pain of disorder has grown to global proportions with therapists listing love relationships as a lead issue in their services. The Creator could never give senseless instructions to His creation. While physical laws are obvious, moral laws may be less obvious but their existence and necessity soon surface.

Sexuality made it to the Ten Commandments. That tells just how significant it is in the sacred scheme of things. It’s place among the ten draws the attention of the humans to handle it with due regard. God’s commandments are the moral pillars of human coexistence and success. They are the makers and markers of community.  Many see the commandments as constrains and therefore rebel by seeking and creating ways of breaking them.

However, experience tells a different story. After wading into the sea of imagined freedom, the freezing waters begin to bite and we can no longer fake the comfort.  We long for the warmth of order.

Sexual liberality unchecked gnaws into the pillars of a community and collapses its joys. The world is physically ordered and is not morally random. The moral dimension of climate change is undeniable and its threat to the physical universe is indisputable. Every person, institution and nation must mind its moral climate for the sake of its raw existence and desired prosperity. While physical laws were span into motion without human involvement, the moral environment is a factor of human choices.

Thus, responsibility is indispensable. At the heart of this responsibility is the unavoidable sacredness of sexuality. Unfettered sexual cultures are a lethal falsehood.